American Academy Announces New Class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members

View the list of new Fellows and FHMs

Cambridge, MA, April 29, 2002 -- The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced its newly elected Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members. The 2002 class of 177 Fellows and 30 Foreign Honorary Members include a United States Senator and Representative, four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, three MacArthur Fellows and six Guggenheim fellows. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, former Senator Warren Rudman, violinist Itzhak Perlman, Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston, author and physician Oliver Sacks, National Medal Of Science For Research On Mental Illness recipient Nancy C. Andreasen, and Nobel Prize winning chemist George Olah are among this year's new Fellows.

The selection of Foreign Honorary Members continues the tradition of honoring distinguished experts and intellectuals from outside the United States whose work complements the values of the American Academy. Niels Bohr, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Albert Camus were among past elected Foreign Honorary Members. This year's class include novelist Milan Kundera; Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe; Lord Anthony P. Lester, president of the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights; and Fritz W. Scharpf, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

"The Academy is pleased to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation's most illustrious learned society. Election to the American Academy is the result of a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. Leslie C. Berlowitz, the Academy's Chief Executive Officer, added, "The American Academy is unique among America's academies for its breadth and scope. Throughout its history, the Academy has gathered individuals with diverse perspectives to participate in studies and projects focusing on advancing intellectual thought and constructive action in American society."

New Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members are nominated and elected by current members of the Academy. Members are divided into five distinct classes: I) mathematics and physics; II) biological sciences; III) social sciences; IV) humanities and arts; and V) public affairs and business. The unique structure of the American Academy allows Members to conduct interdisciplinary studies that draw on the range of academic and intellectual disciplines.

The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The Academy has elected as Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the American Academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social policy, education, and the humanities.

This year's election maintains the Academy's practice of honoring intellectual achievement, leadership, and creativity in all fields. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration and dean of the School of Medicine at Yale; writers Larry McMurtry and Grace Paley; economist and former National Economic Adviser to President Clinton Laura D'Andrea Tyson; Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of the department of computer science at Stanford University; New York Times Editorial Board member Tina Rosenberg; Lawrence Sullivan, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School; Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian David Levering Lewis; Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and businessman Leonard Lauder are also among the Fellows elected in 2002. A full list of new Members is available on the Academy website.

The Academy will welcome this year's new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at the annual Induction Ceremony at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 5, 2002.

For more information about this year's new class or about the Induction Ceremony and other Academy events, please call Phyllis Bendell at (617) 576-5047 or email pbendell@amacad.org.

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